Thursday, October 9, 2014

Amore Peribat

In fact, The Funny just hasn't been coming for a while. I don't feel funny and I don't feel like laughing at the misery of others. This bothersome empathy is really giving me fits.

Empathy is annoying. It's a problem some of us humans have when we see somebody having a rough time and we feel badly for them. I know a sociopath and of all the things I'm envious off, her ability to simply not give a shit about others is top on my list.

Right now, I seem to be surrounded by all kinds of people going through shit. Some are dying, some are surviving, some are just plain hurting.

I see people with smiles on their faces but their eyes say they know it's only temporary and the pain and loneliness they've always been dealing with is right around the corner. When we're with somebody, loneliness stares at us from the shadows and does push-ups while waiting for their next chance to pounce.

In the past week I've seen kids way too young to have the health problems of the elderly get sick and fall apart. I've seen teenaged girls cry because of the pain they've had to endure as their bodies just don't seem to hold up very well.

There just isn't anything funny going on right now.

The other day, a woman younger than myself told me that a person her age dating a guy 15 years younger than me was, "gross and just plain wrong." Up until that point, I was thinking of asking her out.

It's beautiful here in Southern Wisconsin right now. The leaves are changing, the weather has been great and it's just been plain wonderful to be outside. If you don't like this time of year with this kind of weather, then you just don't like anything.

But I can't sleep. I've been going days with just an hour or so of sleep a night. And then I crash for hours and wake up feeling like somebody beat me up in my sleep with a baseball bat.

I've been waking up angry.

I'm supposed to be boxing things up and cleaning so I can move. I haven't done much. I come home exhausted and desperate to just unplug and decompress. I'm getting nothing done.

Nothing has been written in a couple of weeks.

A few days ago was my daughter's 14th birthday. I blanked it out. The day before, I knew what it was, so I told my brain that it needed to function on all cylinders so block it out. I'm good at that.

I've blocked out all kinds of atrocities. I blink and heal my brain with my mind-tools. Or whatever Charlie Sheen is supposed to have said.

Work has been ugly but I'm getting through it. The worst part about it has been been my growing popularity. The other day a girl greeted me with a hug. A hug! It short-circuited something in my brain. I thought, why can't you just be intimidated by me and afraid like all the others?

It certainly makes things easier for me.

Today, somebody felt comfortable enough with me to break down crying and tell me about her feelings. Ugh! And somehow we ended up discussing lady medicine for lady parts during those lady times. It was almost as uncomfortable as the thought of my mother finding my web browsing history.

The other day a friend told me about the times she's been sexually abused and assaulted. And there was nothing I could do but offer pithy catchphrases and fumble through empathetic blithering because there was absolutely nothing I could do and I felt horribly inadequate because of it. I could not undo her trauma and I could not fix the damage. All I could do was be a fucking cheerleader on the sidelines.

It's currently 3:00am. I might sleep a few hours tonight, or this morning, before dragging my ass to work. It is with morbid curiosity I show up at all. Maybe I'll find something to laugh about. I hope I get this pesky empathy under control, though.